


lisieux

by Askance



Series: Mashiach [12]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Mention of Character Death, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2013-05-04
Packaged: 2017-12-10 10:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/784902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"After my death, I will let fall a shower of roses."</p>
            </blockquote>





	lisieux

The cathedral is a ruin reconstituted on the outskirts of everything.

Past the furthest reaches of suburbia, set against a Kentucky road that curves off into the mountains like the grey line of a pencil, it sits a little ways off the asphalt under a low-hanging sky crowded with clouds. The steeple is tall and the stained glass windows are dusty and dim but they catch whatever sun exists, each bit of amber spinning the light to gold.

It isn’t the first cathedral they have seen, but it is the first one that has looked complete.

In the past three years Dean and Castiel have visited every mainland state, rolled down every conceivable backroad through every conceivable boondocks. Castiel has not heard Dean’s voice in more months than he can count on two hands. He spoke, once, near the middle of that first year without his brother, but only to wail Sam’s name into a bluish fog, and since then he’s resumed his silence, and Cas is very much accustomed to it.

And in those three silent years they’ve seen chapels in clapboard shacks, chapels that grew into churches; churches that grew into congregations; daze-eyed murmuring groups of strangers making the congregations grow into sanctuaries. They’ve passed banners of cheap plastic announcing, gently, the construction of true houses of worship in the name of the American Messiah. In the name of Sam. No contractors, no industrial machines—only small communities, fathers in hard hats, children holding nails in their tiny hands, blurring past the windows of the Impala as Dean drove past them with grit teeth, unable, yet, to understand it all.

But these were all works-in-progress; never complete places, never buildings with names, and here, now, slowing on the edge of a coal-black highway, they have found the first.

Dean parks the Impala in the weeds and sits, staring, and Cas sits beside him and stares too.

The grass is pale and trembles up the mountainside, cast silvery with afternoon sunlight, and rusted pickup trucks and lopsided jalopies are parked in a neat row on the opposite side of the white clapboard building. Its tall dark windows are tapered at the tops, and there are images, Cas is sure, picked out in the coloured glass within their frames, but they can’t be seen yet, in the afternoon. There is no cross to top the black-roofed steeple; instead, on the face of the church, below the shimmering rose window, is a diamond of four red circles.

In the rear-view mirror Cas sees Dean’s eyes light on them, and understand them. He takes his hands off the steering wheel and keeps staring, looking it all over as if searching for defect in the cathedral’s construction, as if willing it to fall apart with his gaze alone. In black hand-painted letters above the door Castiel reads _First Pike Church of the American Messiah._

In Dean’s unbroken silence Cas has learned a great deal about reading his thoughts on his face, and without fail upon passing these places, these nameless dedications to the brother he has not stopped grieving, to the still-bleeding body in a crypt in Idaho, Dean’s face has held stormy thoughts. He doesn’t know, Cas thinks, how to react to people beginning to open their eyes and believe, to finding that jolting folk-title on billboards in towns without so much as a population number on their government sign: _Saint Survivor._ Something in this new faith unnerves Dean to his core; Cas can feel it in his bones whenever that unease takes hold of his friend. It makes his hands shake on the Impala’s wheel and his breath seethe in his throat. His eyes fall over those chapels and churches and shrines and say _who told you?_ His teeth pull his lip between them and say _who told you about my Sam?_

“We don’t have to go inside,” Cas says. “We don’t have to be here.”

Dean rarely ever looks at him, but he looks at him now, and then looks back at the cathedral. The four red circles on its white clapboard face. Then he gets out of the car, and Cas follows.

There are five vehicles in the flattened grass and the sun glares off each windshield in turn, blinding. Dean seems to shiver in its light, like a mirage of himself, until they reach the door, the wooden door lovingly painted and painstakingly hung. When Dean pulls on its curved metal handle it sticks in the heat and then opens to the smell of hot dying weeds and incense.

Inside it is very still, and very quiet.

Cas slips in behind Dean as the door falls silently closed and they are pushed into a small darkness, wavering with candle-fire and whiskey-coloured sunlight through the stained glass. It’s a tiny place, though the ceiling soars, and they stand just inside to stare.

The First Pike Church of the American Messiah is ten double rows of pews so rough-hewn that veined and rippled bark still curves along the edges of the seats and a creaking wooden floor, an altar with a blank white cloth draped over it. A ring of red-glass votive candles lines the back wall, and pushing up into the steeple, hung from the rafters, is a crucifix, and at the feet of Christ is a smaller cross—an empty one, with nails in it, as if to hold an absent body in place, and the heads of the nails are red.

Cas hears Dean take a long breath of the musty air, its scent of dirt and smoke and wood.

“We don’t have to be here,” Cas whispers again, acutely aware of the deep shaking in Dean’s marrow, the trembling he can feel in his throat. “Dean.”

But he feels, on some visceral gut-level, that maybe they do. This is the sort of chance they have both learned not to take lightly, the kind of coincidence that haunted Sam while they looked on, those three years ago—blood and wine, passions and ecstasies, a dozen Bible stories playing out across his body—all _chances_ like this one. By some _chance_ they’ve found their way here, to a townless Kentucky cathedral. Of all the forty-seven states they could have been in today, of all the highways they could have taken, but they’re here. Cas looks at Dean and sees him stamped out in whiskey-light against the corner of the church. Maybe they should be here, for some reason that isn’t yet clear. The first cathedral; the first completion.

Perhaps ten people in all are here, inside the church, and Dean and Castiel step aside for a pair of the faithful as they pull open the door to leave. Eight, now. A few sit in the first rows of pews, gazing up at the twin cruciforms, the one bearing Jesus, the other bearing no one, only wounds. Three are lighting candles behind the altar. As they pass the low-slung empty cross they kiss their palms and touch its base and then melt back into the chocolate shadows of the afternoon.

Cas has never stopped to consider how, exactly, the people who have come to believe in Sam might worship in his name. Certainly he wasn’t the Son of God, but he was something else, something high and holy—worthy to be praised. They kneel here, it seems, in reverence to their Messiahs old and new.

Dean moves away from him, down the aisle, but not all the way down. He slips into an empty pew and sits.

Cas doesn’t sit. He wanders sideways, staring at the front of the church—the way the walls slope inward, peak the roof. If the little organ in the back, near the candles, were to be played, the sound would rise and echo here, joyously cloud in the hollow of the ceiling, fill the throats of everyone here with song. He wonders what hymns have been composed about the young man’s corpse in Idaho. What liturgies have been written about the young man sitting in a pew here, now, who nursed the Messiah’s wounds for months and held him in his arms all through that Friday ecstasy. Cas glances at the people—a dark-haired woman at the front, the moving shadows of two children and a man at the back—and wonders if they know who is among them.

After a few moments, the man and the children leave the cathedral, having kissed the empty cross—Sam’s cross, Cas realises—and tipped their heads in reverence to it. Five faithful, now, five strangers. Cas moves along the wall near the windows and looks back at Dean, who is staring at the icons hanging from the ceiling, his hands loose in his lap. His face is unreadable.

The windows are abstracted, but Cas thinks he can pick out images here and there. A hand with a rubied sliver in its palm; a bowl of water spilling, and someone with a deft hand and a clear eyes has gradated the glass so that it washes down from clear summer light to purpled wine to claret blood, and the blood wells against the sill. It shimmers in the drifting sun like the Nile once shimmered around Moses’ staff: red and swelling. The glass is smooth under Castiel’s fingertip.

Another worshipper leaves. Four. As he passes the dark-haired woman Cas can hear her finishing a prayer, and pauses, listening, watching her ritually slide her thumbs against the insides of her palms. “Saint Survivor goes before us,” she whispers, and her eyelids flutter as the prayer settles inside her, and then she opens her eyes and catches his gaze and smiles at him, gently.

She stands, rounds the altar to kiss Sam’s cross, and as she is gathering her purse up against her shoulder and passing him by, he asks, “What did you pray for?”

The woman stops, and glances around—her eyes pass over Dean, Dean who has not stopped staring at this place since he came in, and then they come back to rest on Castiel.

“For goodness,” she says, sounding the smallest bit bewildered. “And peace in my heart.” She peers at him as if he is something new and strange. “Don’t you know about the Saint Survivor?”

Cas swallows something he hasn’t felt keenly in three years. Longing. “I do,” he says. The sun drifts across the window and paints her face ruby red.

“He’s the patron saint of troubled hearts,” she says, as if it’s something everyone knows.

“You pray to him often,” Castiel says. It’s difficult to speak, he finds, around the sudden lump of grief in his throat.

“And it works,” she says, nodding, smiling, as if in a dream. “You know? It works.” And her smile says something to him of the kinds of desperate prayers people only pray in the dead of night with their hands knotted around each other and their hearts on their tongues, and the wash of golden softness that comes after, and he thinks she has felt that and has felt it here. He wonders if she knows what that means. He wonders if he should tell her that he’s held her Messiah in his arms, and so has the man sitting in the pews behind her, and that they know his story better than she ever will, and then he wonders if he should ask her—she who knows, in some small part, the intercession of the Saint—what it feels like to be touched by his love. He is forgetting, to his sorrow, how rich and soft and sun-coloured it had been, to feel loved by Sam Winchester.

She ducks her head and leaves him, then, and Cas realises Dean is looking at him from across the cathedral floor.

Cas can feel his heart beating in his throat and he goes back up, around the aisle, and sits down next to Dean.

That little empty cross, bathed in amber light, the three red nails picked out so brightly on it. He remembers the bowls of blood Dean emptied onto motel lawns, the trashcan full of bandages, the sickly sheen of Sam’s sweat, the dark shadows of his body. The way that, in his last instants, Sam had shone so golden and red and Byzantium-bright-eyed, and then had flickered out like candlelight over precious metal. Dean is trembling next to him and Cas feels himself catch the shudder, and he thinks, _I’m never going to see Sam smile again,_ and his eyes grow hot.

One after the other the last three faithful leave and they are alone.

“It’s Sam’s birthday today,” Castiel says, and Dean nods.

Together they sit in the fourth pew from the front, watching the afternoon fade in slow arcs across the cathedral, over the empty dark spaces where strangers had been praying. This, this small building with its soaring heights, its ritual movements, its quiet smoky air, this is the first finished place. And people will come down, Cas thinks, in their trucks from the hollers, and will sit in these pews and meditate on a man they’ve never seen who gave his whole self and more for their sake though he’d never seen them either. And here they are, ever and always Sam’s first and last disciples, and Cas thinks, _how strange it is to have seen a faith be born, and to exist within it now._

They sit until the sun goes down behind the mountains, until only its orange shade remains to light the cathedral, to push through the coloured glass.

Dean looks down at his feet, and Cas knows without looking at his face what he wants. He stands, and touches Dean’s shoulder for a moment.

Before he leaves to wait outside in the gathering night he rounds the pews and altar and looks at the empty cross hanging at Jesus’ feet, and he kisses his palm and touches the red-headed nail. He remembers, briefly, the look of joy, of homecoming, that had been on Sam’s face as the last of his life had trembled away, and how it had pierced Cas’ heart straight through.

He leaves Dean alone inside. Dusk is rolling down the mountain.

* * *

 

Solitary, now, in the first finished place, Dean stands up from the pew and wanders, aimless, into the cathedral aisle.

He feels adrift in a vast empty space, as if dropped into the middle of a desert or an ocean, though pews still crowd in on either side and the cruciforms seem to bow over his head, poised to drop at any moment, like the vertigo of staring upwards at a skyscraper. He clenches and unclenches his hands.

Cas was right—they don’t have to be here. He has avoided these places since that first tiny shabby chapel years ago, where a grainy photograph of Sam had been the only icon.

Something about them confuses him—hurts him—as if these people who believe in Sam are stealing something from him. They have no idea what they’re praying to. They never saw the bandages or the towels, never held Sam’s bony arm out to wash it clean, never held a bowl of wine that had been blood in their hands, never watched his bright Byzantine eyes roll back in his head to see things too divine for Dean to see. Yet the faith still marches forward, bigger and more solid every day, and he feels trapped underneath its weight, unsure whether to join it or to continue to walk above it, unsure where the greater comfort lies.

Cas had been speaking to a woman, and the echo of their conversation had reached him, earlier, in his seat. _It works. You know? It works._

Suddenly and absolutely, Dean misses Sam so much that he feels as if he is going to burst apart.

He feels himself begin to cry, standing in the middle of the aisle, alone, alone in the locus of the universe where people come to love his brother, and the cathedral stretches to all corners of the world around him and past their walls the mountains and the sky stretch further still, and he is so small and so adrift in the vastness of it, of the space without Sam. He swallows and the tears come faster, hotter, and his knees buckle but he holds himself upright, a single standing thing in the center of his emptiness.

Patron saint of troubled hearts. He thinks, _Sammy, I miss you—Sammy, I need you now._

He has lasted three years on his feet and on the roads with his terrible grief in his throat like a cancer. Three years. He has been standing at the center of the empty universe for three years, three thousand years, three million years. A piercing blade of final sunlight cuts against Sam’s cross and Dean sinks like a weight to his knees on the floor.

He buries his eyes into the heels of his hands and bows forward, every muscle in him mourning, and smells the earth beneath the cathedral and the rain in the grass, the death in the weeds, the heat in the day. His skin smells like the stone of the Idaho crypt and like the gardens of Sam’s veins, three years old, three million miles behind him. _I need you, Sammy,_ he thinks, feeling the prayer shiver on his tongue without sound. _I need you. I miss you so much. I’m falling apart._

His breath rattles in his lungs and his hands are wet.

After a long time, kneeling there, he quiets, and feels himself stop shaking. It’s a relief. But he remains there, crouched and bowed, feeling the warmth slip out of the cathedral as night drapes down, and then there is a soft brush of something against his out-turned wrist, and Dean raises his body up.

It’s a petal. A flower petal, the dull purple of wine, and it slips off his skin as easily as it came; and then another lands in his upturned palm, and another. Rose petals, or the thin blossoms of red columbine, he can’t tell, but another falls, and another, and the smells of dirt and wood slowly give way to the scent of Colorado wildflowers, of mountain storms.

Dean lifts his face and petals drift across it, catching in the tracks of his tears and then falling to the floor.

From the high ceilings of the cathedral, flowers, flowers are falling, as silently as snow, in all shades of red, petals of the rose and the red columbine, of the poppy, the zinnia, the celosia and dianthus, the poinsettia, the aranthera orchid.

Flowers from the dark vaulted shadows as the orange sun pulls away and a warmth, an embrace, settles gently around his shoulders as if welcoming him home.

“Sammy?”

Flowers, falling, petals of the red columbine, of the carnation, falling, petals of the rose.

**Author's Note:**

> This series belongs in part to Casey, whose contributions can be read [here](http://whiskyandoldspice.tumblr.com/fanfiction). 
> 
> St Thérèse of Lisieux was known as "The Little Flower of Jesus" and claimed that, after her death, she would fall from Heaven as a shower of roses.


End file.
